Value from software

Last week I was contacted by a man who wanted me to help his company write better requirements specifications. I suggested that writing better specifications probably would not help, but that there were other things they should try. This was … Continue reading →

So agile is dead or dying you say. I think you are right as long as it is the label itself you are talking about. Everyone claims to be agile and everything is described as agile. But who cares? The … Continue reading →

Posted in agile, english | Comments Off on “Are you agile?” is the wrong question

So, the big debate about agile culture versus agile practices is raging. First Allen Holub wrote a blog entitled The Agile Holocracy. Andrew Binstock followed up with The Corruption of Agile. Uncle Bob then countered with The True Corruption of … Continue reading →

Things that seem self evident are often not… When Ward Cunningham coined the metaphor of technical debt he hardly suspected that there would be widespread controversy over what it was meant to explain. Yet, while researching my posts about Competence … Continue reading →

When I introduced the concept of competence debt I assumed it was an intuitive idea. The discussion since then has proved me wrong. This post is an attempt to explain competence debt more clearly and show how it mirrors technical … Continue reading →

Having just posted my thoughts on #CompetenceDebt: The other kind of software debt and enjoying a lot of positive feedback I was excited when Donald Reinertsen posted his thoughts on Technical debt: Adding Math to the Metaphor. Like Reinertsen, I … Continue reading →

Posted in agile, english | Comments Off on Reinertsen’s strange take on Technical debt

Technical debt Most people in software are familiar with Ward Cunningham´s metaphor of technical debt. The metaphor is so powerful and intuitive that even the Wikipedia page does not really define what technical debt is, only what it leads to. … Continue reading →

Inspect and adapt is a beautifully simple concept. Start with a process and introspect to find areas where things are not optimal. Test remedies for the problems you uncover to see if they improve things. Repeat. In theory you can … Continue reading →

Posted in agile, english | Comments Off on The limitations of inpect and adapt

My friend Johannes Brodwall recently pointed me to a short video by Alistair Cockburn called: Core scrum, barnacles, rumors and hearsay. Alistair uses the elegant analogy of barnacles to describe all the things that have latched on to Scrum over … Continue reading →